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I HATE Customer Service Phone Trees
Okay, I should add a qualifier: I hate customer service phone trees with no option to talk to a real person.
I spent about half-an-hour online (none of the options fit), then on the phone, with FedEx trying to get some information on a recent problem. The problem? For the last four FedEx deliveries, the driver left our package on the ground by our mailbox instead of bringing it up to our house. Our mailbox (as well as our neighbors’) are on the common driveway right off the main road. It’s also a quarter-mile from the house and not visible. In other words, packages left by our mailboxes are easy targets for thieves. FedEx used to bring them to the house, and UPS always has.
I was about to explode when I thought I should look for a local number. I found one, called the number, and there was the option—press 9 to speak to a representative! Halleluiah! The young lady said she couldn’t help me with the problem, but she transferred me to the FedEx mother ship and a real person answered the phone. This lady listened to my complaint, took down some information, then said they’ll get back to me. Okay, maybe they won’t, but at least I managed to break though their shield (a shield worthy of a Star Trek battle cruiser).
Just for giggles, I typed “I hate phone tree customer service” into DuckDuckGo and found a ton of info out there about how much people hate phone trees, some humorous such as this.
Okay, that’s my rant, and “Have a nice day!”
Published in Business
I was going to mention that Full Size Tabby in my rant. Again it is obvious that you put info in to keep YOU entertained/engaged/busy but it doesn’t actually connect with the system.
That’s not really my point. My point is that you need to train the driver. You have to inflict some pain on him, such as having 7 of your parcels in a row reported as stolen, to modify his behavior. FedEx paying a couple of hundred shekels to Vintage Instruments in Philly for damage that should have been prevented by ringing the freaking bell or by placing a plastic bag around the goods no doubt led to the driver’s having better sense the second time.
Because people are talking about deliveries and such, I want to ask if folks (that’s my “Obama-speak”) are having trouble with packages shipped by USPS. Here in Virginia, we sent two packages on the 14th and 16th of December, both to addresses less than 70 miles away, and they still haven’t been delivered. We also should have gotten one that was mailed to us about the same time, but nuttin’ honey.
I’ve been tracking the two we sent, and they went to the USPS black hole in Merrifield around the 20th and have not re-appeared. I stopped at our little one-person PO last Thursday, and very nice postmistress said they were told the “backlog” would be cleared up at the end of this week. So it’s been 21 days for the first one, 19 for the second. I’ve heard a few similar stories locally, but was wondering if this is a wider issue.
(@Stad , sorry for hijacking your phone-tree thread)
No problemo! It’s karma, given how many times I’ve done it myself . . .
Wow, sorry to hear that. I don’t send much in the way of packages from No. Virginia–which I assume uses Merrifield–but I have at least one bill that I paid by mail around the 18th that is MIA. So that would be over two weeks for a letter.
Yeah, we mailed in one payment well ahead of time, and when it was still not received the day before it was due, I paid it online. Now I have another month’s credit, of course.
Actually- both fedex and ups sub out to usps. That’s why the packages end up at the mailbox. USPS Drivers don’t do walkways and porches……
Which is, after all, the whole point. A successful customer “service” from their point of view.
Actually not true. Like most human systems it is a system of trade offs, incentives, and things that are hard to measure. It is true that the easiest to measure statistic is Average talk time (ATT), so a simplistic model is lower the average talk time for all interactions; however, the actual goal is Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), which is insanely hard to measure. These are in some tension; however, most people want a speedy resolution, so maybe if we are lucky ATT is a good proxy for CSAT. Unfortunately that does really appear to be the case. People really want effective talk time, that is the shortest possible time that leads to the desired result. Well run call centers and well designed phone trees are trying to get you to the person who we’ll be most successful at solving your problem the quickest. Unfortunately there is one thing here that is cheap and easy to measure and two things that are expensive and complex to measure.
I’ve run into a few companies that ignore 0.
You should be able to find or get a direct phone number to that station. They do exist, but it can take a little work to get it, rather than just being told to call 1-800-ASK-USPS. Thanks to that, I’ve been able to get local station people out quickly to deal with mailbox units left unlocked by carriers, etc.
Actually, one time I was trying to deal with a problem where a package had been sent to an old address, because of some kind of glitch at the company I’d ordered from. Rather than take 3 or 4 different city buses to the other PO to perhaps end up getting nowhere, I got a direct number from my local PO. They answered quickly… it turned out the number I had been given was the one for the carriers to use if they got into an accident. :-)
Sure. Probably more than a few. But it does work at times, and it’s very satisfying when it does.
I’ve benefited from these screw-ups a few times. One time, for example, I had bought some high-end vintage audio gear on ebay. UPS showed that it had been delivered, and even signed for, but it wasn’t delivered to ME, or signed for by ME. They couldn’t figure out where it was, the driver didn’t remember where he’d delivered it… So I got reimbursed by UPS for the whole value including shipping. A couple days later, the people it had been delivered to, the same “house number” but 3 streets to the south, brought it to me. :-)
By then it may very well have been a different driver.
You into tubes?
My daughter in KC MO was expecting a package from her aunt in Mokena IL by USPS. It was sent on Dec 11 and arrived Dec 31. She was able to track it with some app from the post office that tells you what is coming in your mail. The package made it all the way to Arlington IL by Dec 20, a distance of about 80 miles. I dropped off packages at UPS today. They will be in KC and South Dakota respectively by Wednesday – cheapest rate. I rarely mail anything through the post office. It’s ridiculously expensive and priority two day usually means at least four days.
Sometimes delays like that are due to damaged address areas, if something is wrapped in paper with the address on the outside it may have been lost entirely… Another problem I’ve encountered is if someone sends me something using a box that was used for something else before. USPS is pretty clear about “obliterating previous bar codes” and they mean it. It might seem like a pretty minor thing, but if something like a confusing bar code kicks a package out of their usual system, it can take quite a while for them to get it to you “manually.” Apparently they are “administratively incapable” (as we put it in my younger days) of doing something simple like just covering over the offending bar code and putting it back into the system.
The larger problem you can frequently encounter with USPS, though, is that their insurance is essentially worthless. Even if they lose something completely, you still have to prove that it was what you said it was, and its value, etc. If they disagree about the value, you get what THEY think it’s worth, not what you paid for it, or the amount you insured it for… As far as I’m concerned if I mail a brick insured for $1 million and they lose it, they should pay me $1 million. Because that’s what I paid for with the insurance. But they won’t. They’ll say a brick is 25 cents at Home Depot, and yours was “used” so here’s 10 cents have a nice day.
And if your item is just damaged, you might as well forget it. With USPS, damage is always due to “inadequate packaging.” I’ve received packages that had tire tread marks on them, and was told “inadequate packaging.”
Yes sometimes it does. For other places, all you can do is not enter information when asked: account number, etc. Sometimes that will just hang up on you too, but other times it gets you to a person.
Not really, I can’t afford it to start with, and I like stuff with more power. That particular instance was a mint-condition JVC JT-V77 tuner and JA-S77 amplifier, top of the line from about 1978 or so, with manuals.
Luxman still makes fine tube gear, but what I wanted – and finally got – was a set of their Laboratory Reference Series (LRS) components also from about 1978. 5C50 preamp, 5T10 tuner (analog, which I prefer), and 5M21 power amp with meters. CD didn’t exist at that time, but I finally found a very rare DZ-03 CD player from someone in Germany, which is a pretty good cosmetic match and happens to have a couple tubes in the final output section and sounds amazing.
If you find the nearest PO Customer Service Center for your area, they have a lot more information available than even the local POs have, they can get photos of your items in transit, etc.
Also, for sure regarding USPS and may be somewhat true for other services as well, a lot of the “tracking” information you can access online (which is less than the stations have) isn’t “real.” That is, it didn’t come from actual scans of your item. It’s computer-generated based on certain assumptions.
For example, if the truck that your item was supposed to be on, arrives at your PO station, it’s listed as having “arrived” there even if it maybe didn’t actually make it onto the truck. Your item may not have been actually scanned going into the truck, nor when the truck arrived at the station. And if the truck was supposed to arrive at the station before the carriers left for their daily routes, it may show as “out for delivery” – which was also computer-generated – even if the carriers left before the truck arrived and everything was unloaded/sorted.
I find it hard to believe most of these companies care at all. If they cared, they would staff their centers to provide timely customer service, not 40 min waits on hold
Companies want customers to buy their products and services and never complain, and they want to provide only enough service to get that buy and they then want customers to shut up and go away. I see nothing to show that any time I am sitting on hold that me call “is very important” to them. That is a lie.
I find it impossible to believe customer “service” centers are anything other than attempts to get customers to go away. They want customers off the phone as fast as they can manage. They just as soon not have a phone line at all. Why, I can think of an example right now that has no number, and, in the past, has totally ignored customer complaint emails.
My only data point is that companies appear to be willing to spend millions of dollars for what my employer offers, which is a technology to hopefully make that smoother. There are certainly easier and cheaper ways to do that if you goal isn’t something beyond just get the customer to go away and not bother you anymore. In truth it is a complex communication problem where the person you are likely to get to in that 40 min is unlikely in the extreme to have the authority to solve your issue. In a certain sense it is bound to fail some if not most of the time. There are certainly some companies that do a lousy job with Customer Satisfaction; however, they at least pay lip service to it and spend money on it, and on trying to improve it. Since it is a problem of human communication and normally problem solving, two things we pay lip service to in the modern world; however, are mal-educating our young people to be able to deal with I suspect the issues around it are going to get worse. Which is good news for my financial and work future I suppose.
I was beginning to think I was the only one. Merrifield apparently has all the January Magnificats (Dominican monthly prayer book) in northern Virginia along with my Netflix dvds and various Christmas packages. I assume 3/4s of their personnel have COVID or “are working from home” (which is hard to do when you’re delivering mail) !?!
Oh and as to USPS having trouble with poorly wrapped packages, Magnificats have usually arrived 2-3 weeks before the beginning of the next month. Maybe all those Ballots for Biden gummed up the works. 🤔
One thing I discovered was the USPS will say an Amazon package was delivered when in fact it wasn’t. Apparently they get paid for on-time delivery, so they’ll mark something “delieverd on ___” and actually bring it by Monday. However, I don’t mind it so much because the last thing I want is for a package to sit overnight in our mailbox, which is 1/4 mile from the house and not visible.
So true. The only wrinkle is when the problem doesn’t fit the phone-tree logic, and there’s no option to go straight to a human.
Which is actually normally the case. The most effective phone trees are often the shortest. Problem is most companies who make phone systems tout the complexity of the phone tree as a selling point. Also there is the allure of using the additional upfront information to make the actual interaction smoother, in my experience it doesn’t but that doesn’t keep people from engaging in magical thinking.
Customer service lines almost universally stink. Maybe they are spending their money wrong if after millions of dollars they stink.
I can count on one hand the times I was happy with a customer service call of any sort to any big company where I am not talking to someone in the local office.
Companies do a lousy job at customer service. If they cared, I think they would be able to figure it out. But they don’t. I don’t know who uses your software or not, but my experience is, lots of waiting and people that cannot solve problems if they don’t fit into their neat boxes. IT is the worst, because I would not have called if I had not tried all the stupid crap they want me to do in the first place. YES it is plugged in, YES I rebooted it. YES all the cords are connected. I already tried all that easy stuff, it is why I am calling in.
Don’t get me started on cable.
I got “package was not delivered because the owner wanted it held” which was a flat out lie. They did not even come to the house, nor even deliver mail that day. It was a flat out lie.